Chants of a Lifetime offers an intimate collection of stories, teachings, and insights from Krishna Das, who has been called “the chant master of American yoga” by the New York Times. Since 1994, the sound of his voice singing traditional Indian chants with a Western flavor has brought the spiritual experience of chanting to audiences all over the world. He has previously shared some of his spiritual journey through talks and workshops, but now he offers a unique book-and-CD combination that explores his fascinating path and creates an opportunity for just about anyone to experience chanting in a unique and special way.

Chants of a Lifetime includes photos from Krishna Das’s years in India and also from his life as a kirtan leader—and the CD that is offered exclusively in the book consists of a number of “private” chanting sessions with the author. Instead of just being performances of chants for listening, the recordings make it seem as if Krishna Das himself is present for a one-on-one chanting session. The idea is for the listener to explore his or her own practice of chanting and develop a deepening connection with the entire chanting experience.

Excerpt:

The Heart of Practice: Just Do It

One of the first times I was ever interviewed was by a writer from Yoga Journal, who asked me to talk about chanting as a spiritual practice. I was taken by surprise. The truth is that I’d never thought of it like that before. Of course, that’s what chanting is, but I didn’t have it in my mind that I was doing a “practice.” I was just trying to get my life together, so I didn’t have much to tell him. Then he asked, “Well, how do you sing?” I thought about it and remembered when I’d gotten my junior driving permit. I was driving in my car alone for the first time and going to my girlfriend’s house. I turned on the radio and our song came on. The way I sang that song at that moment is the way I chant.

I was living in the temple with Maharaj-ji in the fall of 1972, during the festival known as Durga puja, a fire ceremony that goes on for nine days and celebrates the destruction of various demons by the goddess who manifests after being prayed to by all of the gods. It is one of the biggest festivals of the year, and many of the devotees would come to the temple to stay with Maharaj-ji for the entire period. Because of the nature of Indian culture, it was also one of the few times that his female devotees—the Mas, or mothers, as they’re called—were able to come and be with him for an extended period. They’d all live together in the back of the temple, and at night they’d gather to sing holy songs and chant in one of the inner rooms that was off-limits to men.

I would sit outside the window of that room for hours, totally immersed in the intensity, passion, and joy that these ladies sang with. The chanting would be going on for while, and then all of a sudden there would be a scream of ecstasy as one of women went into a state of absorption in God. The sweetest thing was that when they discovered I was sitting outside and listening for so many hours, they cracked the window so that I could hear better, knowing I’d respect their privacy. This was one of my most important and life-changing experiences. I bathed myself in their devotion and opened up new rivers of love in my heart.

The heart of this practice is simply repeating the Name over and over again. Everything comes from that because it is said that everything is contained within the Name. When I can do this wholeheartedly, then I’ll see if there is anything else I have to do. In the meantime, it’s enough. When I’m really chanting—singing the Name and coming back to it again and again—no matter what is going on in my head, I have to let go of it. There’s no option. The only option is to sing. And that’s what the instruction is: Sing. Not to think or imagine anything; not to try to make anything happen; not to ruminate about stuff that happened earlier or might happen later . . . I just have to sing. I try to gather all of my strength together and sing, no matter what.

When I started, even if I got myself to sit down and sing, my mind was somewhere else in a second. But that’s the beauty of this practice. We start from where we are. We get lost in thought, and we come back. As soon as we realize that we’re gone, we come back. It’s amazing. Most of us will have to do it 40 billion times a minute, but that’s okay. As soon as we realize we’re gone, we’re already back. Then by the time we realize that, we’re gone again. Thinking I’m back is not the same as being back.

Recognizing that we’re lost in thought is the first step in turning within. We can’t hold on to the awareness in the same way that we clutch a cookie in our hand. It’s not something we can understand or think about in our head. That’s why we’re asked to simply chant. The chanting begins to draw us into a deeper space in our own being, so we sit more at ease in ourselves.
Chanting is called a practice for one reason: it only works if we do it.

Chanting has been my main practice for years, but it took me a long time to realize that it’s only by doing it regularly that we begin to experience ourselves changing. If we want to get wet, we have to jump in the water. If we want to stay wet, we have to learn to swim, or at least float! We can read about sugar, people can tell us about sugar and describe the sweetness to us, but if we want to know what it tastes like, we’ve got to put some in our mouths. That’s why we do practice: we must have our own experience. In order for it to help when difficult things in life happen—we lose someone, we get sick, we have a car accident, or someone dies—we have to do it. Over time, we’ll see that we’re getting stronger, making it easier to deal with difficult situations.

***

During the rainy season in Kainchi, Maharaj-ji used to have a bunch of guys come up from Brindavan to sing kirtan. These kirtan walas, as they’re called, would sing Hare Krishna from about four in the morning until eleven at night. They’d sing in shifts, switching off to rest and eat, but it was still about six hours of chanting a day for each of them. One year, toward the end of the season, just before the ashram was to be closed for the winter, one of these guys tried to seduce one of the Western women. This was a big no-no. Maharaj-ji found out about it, and in about ten minutes all of the kirtan walas were loaded onto the back of a truck with their stuff and taken to the train to go back to Brindavan.

One of the Indians in the temple asked Maharaj-ji, “Who’s going to sing now? You just kicked out the kirtan walas.” Maharaj-ji said, “The Westerners.” Actually, this wasn’t good news to me. The little room where the kirtan was sung was around the corner from where Maharaj-ji came out and sat. So if he came out during my shift, I wouldn’t be able to see him. Days could pass and I wouldn’t have a chance to sit with him. Disaster!

We had one instruction: Sing. There was nothing about stopping. I’d be singing Hare Krishna with a couple of other devotees, bored out of my mind: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. . . . We couldn’t stop, we had to keep going—that was the instruction. It was torture. My whole life passed before my eyes when I was singing. I remembered everything from when I was a kid. I relived my life about a thousand times up to that moment. Even though I was trying to pay some attention to what I was doing, I was not very successful. I’d be singing Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, then I’d remember my ex-girlfriend back in the States. All of a sudden Hare Krishna would get a bit juicier. I’d sing like that for a while. Then I’d remember that she broke up with me, and I’d start experiencing rage and anger and hurt—all the while, the mantra kept going on.

Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was lucky. There was nowhere to go. I mean, how many times can you get up and go to the bathroom? I was supposed to be singing, so I just kept singing . . . and, because there was no option, nowhere to go, no channel to change, some part of me finally gave up. I began to relax into the chanting. And then quite unexpectedly, I had my first experience of the power of chanting. I noticed that my thoughts didn’t stick to me the way they usually did and that I wasn’t completely lost in them. I’d see the thoughts come, and while I might “be thinking” for a while, then I’d see the thoughts go. All of a sudden there were holes in the endless flow of completely unconscious thinking. And those holes were filled with Hare Krishna.

Thoughts would come and go but wouldn’t take me with them. I wasn’t making any effort to avoid thoughts, but the continued repetition of the Name had naturally gotten sweeter and I was enjoying being in it. It was as if I now had more room in me and the thoughts would float by like clouds, coming and going across the sky. No one was more surprised than I was.
I’m reminded of these words by Swami Sivananda:

The name of God, chanted correctly or incorrectly, knowingly or unknowingly, carefully or carelessly, is sure to give the desired result. The glory of the name cannot be established through reasoning and intellect. It can certainly be experienced or realised only through devotion, faith and constant repetition of the name. Every name is filled with countless potencies or saktis [powers]7.

One day I headed for the bathroom while the other devotees kept singing. I usually tried to sneak a quick moment with Maharaj-ji, but he’d inevitably motion for me not to come. On this day I didn’t even try to go sit with him and went straight to the bathroom. On my way back, though, without thinking about it, I went and sat down with him. He didn’t stop me, as if it were the most natural thing for me to do. He was talking to a couple of other devotees, and I was sitting there gazing at him. The sound of the kirtan was coming over the loudspeaker, and I remember thinking how beautiful it was. The next thing I knew, Maharaj-ji was patting me on the head and saying, “Very good. Very good. Go sing.” I’d disappeared into the sound of the chant and hadn’t even realized it!

Maharaj-ji planted the seeds of this practice in me. It wasn’t until many years after he died that I was able to pick up the thread of what he’d given me at that time. I had to be forced to give the practice time to work on me, to let me experience what happened when my inner direction changed. Instead of constantly looking out there—take this, take that, buy this, look at this, go there, eat this—I experienced how the chanting started to move me inward, into myself.

***

If we aren’t doing a practice, we don’t realize how “gone” we are most of the time. We float through our dream day, totally unaware, running on automatic, reacting and being pushed around by our thoughts and emotions. When we begin to do a practice, we begin to see how we waste our time.
Even though our thoughts take us away—and many different memories, fantasies, and impressions continually arise—we can always return again to the repetition of the Name. Every single time we return to the practice, we are overcoming ancient innate tendencies of the mind to flow outward. Every time we come back, we are reminding ourselves where to look, and it gets deeper each time. This is why it’s said that what matters isn’t how many times we go away, but how many times we come back, because each time we come back, we are coming back to the singularity of the Name.

Now it is but natural that a thing impressed consciously a hundred times is far more effective than the unconscious single impressions of a hundred different things. By simple calculation, the repeated impressions survive, and the others fade out. No single Name inhaled or exhaled is wasted, and each one progressively identifies the devotee with God.8

Through practice, a part of us learns what it feels like to let go of whatever takes us away, and we come back—let go, come back, let go, come back. With the constant repetition of that process, we intuitively develop the ability to let go. As time goes on and difficult experiences arise, all that work of letting go kicks in and we find ourselves more present and better able to deal with them. We are able to let go of the destructive habits and thoughts that make dealing with crises so overwhelming for us. It’s the same process.

When we come into the presence of love, we can’t let go fast enough. It’s everything we want. That’s when we experience how stuck we are. We have to practice letting go in little bits—a little bit every day—so that when those moments occur, more of who we are can get through the door. We can’t get through the door carrying all of our luggage. We learn not to pack that bag with so much stuff all the time. When we’re more available for those moments, they last longer. We spend less time in heavier, darker states of mind.

The Names we chant move us into a space that’s a little less obsessive, a little less constricted, more open and relaxed. The idea being that once we see what’s in that room, we’ll want to go in because it feels like home.
I approach chanting in a very pragmatic way: I try not to create any fantasies in my head about what is supposed to be happening. I get to this place of simply being inside of myself. Anything that raises anticipation or creates an expectation of what is going to happen is a hindrance. To me it is not about trying to achieve ecstatic states. It is about love. I want to be there all the time. Ecstasy comes and goes. I want to get to the place where there’s only Sitaram. I don’t want to be thinking about love, I want to be in love and eventually become love.
In the words of St. Teresa of Avila:

Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.9

One of the biggest obstacles to practice is the expectations we bring to it. For instance, if I’m leading a workshop and say, “Okay, now we’re going to meditate,” everybody starts to sit up straight and get tense, filled by the idea that I am going to do something. We expect the sky to open and nectar to pour all over us.

In reality, it’s not like that. We have so many expectations that when we sit down to meditate or chant we’re crippled by anxiety, evaluating what we’re doing. How’s this? Is this good? Yeah, that’s good. I’m watching my breath, I’m watching my breath . . . that’s very good. Yeah, in, out, okay, good, okay . . . and the ego gets a subtle stroking and feels good about itself for doing this. Practices take time. They work slowly, from the inside out. “Sudden” enlightenment takes millions and millions of births.

About the Author:
In the winter of 1968, Krishna Das met spiritual seeker Ram Dass and was enthralled by the stories of his recent trip to India, where he met the legendary guru Neem Karoli Baba. Soon thereafter, he left behind his dreams of being a rock ’n’ roll star and was on his way to India to meet this remarkable man. In the three years he spent there with Neem Karoli Baba, Krishna Das’s heart was drawn to the practice of Bhakti Yoga—the yoga of devotion—and especially to the practice of kirtan (chanting the Names of God).

Krishna Das returned to the United States and began developing his signature chanting style, fusing traditional kirtan structure with Western harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities. He continues to travel the world leading call-and-response kirtans and sharing this deep, experiential practice with thousands of people.